Email Newsletter Survey: Small Business Email Newsletters Still Work

I recently saw results from a survey done by our friends over at Bredin Business Information, a company that specializes in small business research. Although there weren’t a huge amount of participants in the survey, I thought it was very telling for the state of email marketing and social media.

Our most recent survey asked SMB marketers how effective their email newsletters are in the “always on” era of Twitter, blogs, forums and social networks. The net: email newsletters
continue to work well.

Of the respondents, 58%currently have an email newsletter for small and medium businesses. Here’s their take:

Performance is on target. 53% of respondents rate their newsletters as performing on or above overall goals. 48% say their newsletter performance is improving slowly, and 38% report no change in performance – in other words, roughly nine out of 10 newsletters are holding steady or improving, even as social networking dominates the B2B press.

Well perceived. 48% of respondents say that their email newsletter program has become seen within their company as more important in the past year or two; another 48% report its perception is unchanged. Only 5% of respondents say their newsletter is seen as less important.

Strong by comparison. When all survey respondents were asked to rate the performance of a variety of online marketing tactics, email newsletters ranked fifth out of 13 options. 74% of
respondents rated newsletters as somewhat or very effective, compared to banner ads (80%), SEO (78%), educational resource centers (76%) and SEM (75%). LinkedIn and YouTube were least effective, both 24%.

So how is your newsletter doing? The summer months have been pretty slow all around but brace yourself for the last quarter of the year. It’s right around the corner.